Hi all,

This is the age of information. We get all information we require at the click of a few buttons or keys. And this information age lead to the rise of online news portals like Google News, Yahoo! News etc.  These portals enabled live access to news, from anywhere in the world, for free!

Yes, we’ve seen, experienced, and enjoyed the various news services… So when Arun started talking about Taazza during the BarCampBangalore5, held at IIM B, I thought I was in for a boring 1 hour… Boy, way I wrong!!!

Taazza, I found, as did the 30 others in the room, was not just a news portal, but it was a news portal of our dreams! Taazza combined a jazzy, Web 2.0, live look with hard hitting news organised and presented in a refreshingly new manner!

Fresh News, Refreshing Perspective. Their tag line proudly says. And I’ve got to admit, its pretty right! The service is updated as soon as one of the hundreds of news websites are updated. With a unique algorithm, they have taken into consideration several factors which define which story should come first.

The news has been tagged as Places, People and Quotes. This is one of the highlights of Taazza. Its pretty cool to do research! Imagine you have a story with, say, Mr Osama Bin Laden. But you’re a beginner, and you don’t know who Osama is. So, when you’re reading the story on Osama, you see in the People tab, "Osama Bin Laden". Click on that link, and it takes you to a page with background material on the person, previous stories, and pictures. How cool is that?!!

But you’ve think you’ve seen it all? Wait till you experience the Newsmap view! Click on the small icon with two rectangular boxes( ), and experience the master of all views! Experience the joy of reading a newspaper, just as it is, but in a live form, with the most relevant headlines selected automatically and placed according to relevance. You get news accurate to 2 minutes. You get references to blogs, to Wikis, to social networking sites. All mighty fast, thanks to their back end based on Ruby On Rails.

So what do you think? Why don’t you go ahead and check it out? Leave them a few comments as well! They’re planning to introduce new features, include personalisation, and start a web forum. I say, HatsOff to the Taazza team!

Technorati Tags: taazza, news, news portal, refreshing perspective, india news

Hi,

I’m enjoying my 2nd day in BarCampBlog 5 in IIM Bangalore, and Nithya from Muziboo and she opines that Indian bloggers are reluctant to give out reviews. She says that she has approached very many bloggers in Bangalore for reviews about her representative site, Muzboo, which is like a music social networking site, and most of them side lined the request with a ’seemingly’ friendly "Let me see…" And they never respond…

Is this true? Nithya opines that Indian bloggers unlike western bloggers have a comparatively closed mindset. And this prevents Indian bloggers from a "social responsibility" of blogging as a medium to return something to the system from which we consume.

Well, I believe that this is not true. Blogging itself is a sort of contributing as well as consuming. If we’re talking about a ‘perfect’ world wherein every person is ready to help every other person out, well, I think thats more Utopian than Karl Marx’s world.

Now we all know that bloggers and people too (duh!) (no offence to bots!). We have our own moods and interests. If something recommended is not to our taste, well, why should we blog about it?

I think Nithya’s experience is a very unlucky and unfortunate one, wherein she contacted the wrong people at the wrong time.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: indian, blogging, bloggers, mindset, muziboo, word of mouth, reluctant

We have Mr Jerry here flogging blogs right and left… A forum of around 40 bloggers are giving views, reviews, and abuse  about member blogs, and I should say, its pretty informative and constructive.

I’ve a got a lot of "flogs" too, and I’m altering my content on the spot…

We’ve gone through quite a few blogs now, including photoblogs and splogs. General comments are against heavy and cluttered blogs, and for neat and well designed blogs.

Technorati Tags: bcb5, flog the blog

Hi all,

This is the small minutes of the session with Mr Amit Aggarwal from Digital Inspiration. Here, Amit, spurred on by the 60 strong audience, talked about traffic, monetization, ethics, new ventures in blogging

• How to succeed in blogging : Blog about simple things which you enjoy blogging
• Methods to monetize : Adsense, Blog Ads, Chitika
• Methods NOT to monetize : Text Link Ads
• Monetization works best when your content and advertisement is integrated
• 125X125 buttons for brand building, not traffic
• Social Content Networking sites traffic tend to flame and are unreliable
• Digg, Del.icio.us are kind of useless in a longer frame of time
• Dont worry about Digg if you’re new to blogging, form a network

This is just news. Reviews and views coming up later today….

Technorati Tags: amit aggarwal, traffic, money, blog

I’m in the blogging collective right now, and Amit Aggarwal, has just started talking about Blogging.

So keep tuned.